Do Dwobbits Dream of Clockwork Sheep?
by LilLolaBlue
Summary: I'm Hela Took, a Dwobbit Metalsmith Engineer. Welcome to Post-Apocalyptic Middle Earth. Where Steampunk Dwarves fought traditional Elves for 200 years & everyone lost. Mordor is a huge Sin City, where gladiators fight to the death in glitzy casinos. But, some old warhorses have weaseled their way back from Valinor to Save the Day. Don't hold your breath. I'm not. NO SLASH.


**DO DWOBBITS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?**

**Chapter One: A Clockwork Balrog, or Mahal's Steampunk Hammer**

**Middle Earth, Year 455 of the Fifth Age**

So, Frodo and so forth and Gandalf and the Elves sailed off to the Undying Lands, and Aragorn became King, and the Dwarves went back to their caves and men took over Middle Earth and the Hobbits were rustic and happy, and everybody lived happily ever after.

Yeah, right.

Fuck that noise.

Do you really think that time goddamn well stopped in the Middle Ages for Middle Earth, and that shit didn't get as cocked up here, as it did in your universe?

In that case, welcome, my friends, to the Fifth Age.

The Age of Steam.

It would take me an age to explain to you how Middle Earth went from a pastoral dark ages walking tour to a weird-o-rama gonzo steampunk Ren Faire from Hell, so I'll give you the short version.

The Dwarves wrought an Industrial Revolution, about 400 years before now,, when Wotan the All-Father of Steam perfected two of his many world-shattering inventions.

The pistol, and the coal-driven, steam-powered engine.

Steam Tech was embraced by most Men and some Hobbits, but rejected, suppressed and oppressed by the Elves, and those among Men who sided with them.

This led to a rather large war, which, surprisingly, the Uruk-Hai of Mordor, led by that death-proof bastard Saruman, sat out.

They had a nice, long, 200 year giggle, built Mordor into a Sin City of epically degenerate proportions, and let us kill each other over nothing.

At the onset of the war, the Hobbits did something very smart.

They hired a shitload of their Dwobbit brethren to build a great whopping wall around the Shire and Buckland, and declared their neutrality, as well as the world's first Free Tech Zone.

That is, a place where those who want to use steam tech, do, and those who are opposed don't.

The rest of us, the Dwobbits of the Hills of Evendim, included, engaged in the Great World War.

Dwobbits, in case you haven't figured it out from the name, are a result of the mingling of the residents of the Shire and the Dwarves of the Blue Mountains, pretty much over the last 400 years or so after the railroads made it easier to travel between the both.

Some live in the Shire and Buckland, and some in the Blue Mountains, but we have our own little nation-state, Khazadshire, bordered by the River Lune to the West, the Hills of Evendim to the North, the Westmarch to the East, and the Brandywine River to the South.

It's pretty much only big enough for the city of Dwobbiton and its outskirts, and a few little farms and homesteads, but there aren't so many of us that we don't have enough room, and it's not as if Dwobbits are unwelcome in the Shire or the Blue Mountains, ort and of the Dwarf Homeland kingdoms, for that matter.

Khazadshire, is a lovely place, all of which is inside the Great Wall of Hobbiton, and one of the few places in Middle Erath that remains unspoiled by the War.

The Blue Mountains didn't do so badly, either.

Kind of makes me wish I had never left me own neck of the woods, but, sing as you go.

Anyway, the War lasted for about two hundred years, and resulted in many unfortunate consequences in which many places were laid waste, great kingdoms fell, the fabric of civilization was rent into bits, and many, many, many people became extremely brown bread.

Dead, that is.

The United Kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor became fragmented, again, the woods of Lothlorien were sacked and burnt, the great Hall of Edoras was blown to smithereens, and some utterly genocidal number of Elves died in the 150 year siege of Moria, the birthplace and homeland of Steam Tech, and all it wrought, including tanks, guns, and heavy artillery.

After about 50 years, the Dwarves of Moria stopped fighting the Enemy, as it was pathetically easy to kill them, and sent out troops only in the infrequent event of an attack.

Mostly, they just fired food, supplies and fresh tents over the walls of Moria three times a week.

Finally, with a spot of help, the Dwarrows of Moria found the corpse of the Balrog of Morgoth, and elevated a brilliant young soldier and would- be metalsmith engineer from the belly of a gear-gyro tank (Hint: Me) to add some cogs, gears, wheels, bells and whistles, as well as some serious heavy metal spare parts, and turned it into a biomechanical ultimate weapon.

They only had one problem with it.

It wouldn't follow orders.

The Lord of Moria, Dwalin the Deathless, came up with the idea that since the Balrog was an avatar of fire, of the line of Loki, perhaps it would listen only to a Dwarf from same.

Or, maybe it only trusted it's maker.

That is where I come in.

My name is Hela Took, the Fire Hammer, and my father is Fenrir the Berserk, son of Slepnir the Terrible, son of Vi the Warhammer, son of Loki, the Trickster God of Fire.

They call me Fire Hammer, or, in Sindarin, Baradhring, because I'm the first in the family since Vi, son of Loki, to have power over Fire.

And that, O best beloved, is how a Dwobbit from a homestead in the hinterlands of the Hills of Evendim, not even 33 years old, came to be riding on the back of the Balrog of Morgoth, when the main gates of Moria opened for the first time in 150 years, leading a column of tanks, steam trucks, and 20,000 strong heavily armed Dwarves and Men, each carrying sn axe, a sword and a machine gun, followed by the cavalry of Rohan, armed with repeating rifles, and a battalion of bio-mechanical Cave Trolls, hauling anti-tank guns.

That had the same effect on our war that the A-Bomb had on your clusterfuck.

Stopped it, cold.

The only problem was, the non-industrial world was in ruins, the industrial world was ravaged, and all the Hooray Henries and toffs who had a mandate to govern were either dead, discredited, or about to be torn into pieces by angry mobs, on both sides.

Sometimes angry mobs made up of people from all races, and both sides.

We had riots, food shortages, mass suicides, weird new religions, ritual human sacrifice and cannibalism, anarchy, warlords, mass murder and rape, runaway inflation, famine, and occasional cannibalism.

Just like we had during the War.

Clearly, our situation had NOT improved.

That was when a Dwobbit named Kili Took, the son of the Thain of the Shire, and my first cousin, did something so desperate and stupid that even if it hadn't worked, he would have still been called a hero.

Cousin Kili got in a boat and sailed to the Undying Lands to hip the heavy hitters as to what had been transpiring whilst they were resting on their laurels.

And before you Ringers all begin to shit your pants at once, let me explain how some sundry gents that Professor Tolkien didn't mention ended up in Valinor.

For one thing, King Thorin, being absolutely dead sexy, for anyone, let alone a Dwarf, he got his own back on the Elves by nailing every female Elf he could get his hands on for about two hundred years.

And let's just say that the King Under the Mountain, he was one hell of a master Blacksmith, he really knew how to bring his mighty hammer down in the forge, wink, wink, nude, nudge, say no more.

And his nephews, especially Fili, boy, were they a couple of chips off the old block!

I mean, if you see any short Elves around with scant beards, yeah, that's where they came from.

So, when Thorin was dying, you would have thought it was the end of all the ages the way they came, the way they tell it to us kids, a veritable army of Elven ladies, weeping and screaming and ripping their clothes. and if they would have had to carry Thorin Oakenshield on their backs and walk on water they would have taken him to the Undying Lands.

His nephews too.

And rules like, well, sorry Elrond, you daughter is moral now, and so is her husband, your foster son Aragorn, they can't come to Valinor now that he's old and sick and half dead and she'll be alone.

Uh-huh.

Sure.

If you believe that, I have some real estate on the Lonely Mountain to sell you for a handful of warg shit.

And as for Boromir-

-Yes, my fangirls, BOROMIR!-

He washed up on the shores of the Undying Lands, and the fine courtly Elf maidens plucked him out of the water like he was Moses in the bullrushes, and I knwo taht story because I heard it personally from the horses' mouth.

So, now that we are done with those bits of information, I was talking about my crazy cousin and his mad plan to Save Middle Earth, thank you.

He must have made a very good case for the proposition that what was left of Middle Earth would collapse into barbarism and anarchy, because the Valar permitted some of the heroes of the past to return, and clean up the mess.

Still, Kili returned with only a few brave and crazy souls.

Thorin Oakenshield, who was dead chuffed to hear about the astounding and lucrative advances of his people, and was glad to assume kingship over the Dwarven race, from the ancestral throne of Durin the Deathless, in Moria.

Lady Galadriel, her husband, Celeborn, and their magic rings, to get the Elves' act together, and Legolas Greenwood, who would assume control of his ancestral lands in the wilds of Mirkwood.

Boromir of Gondor agreed to become King of Gondor, and his brother, Faramir, would be King of Arnor.

They returned with a Ranger named Strider, who was going to do what he did best, and wander Middle Earth with a new group of Rangers, including Kili Took, and keep the peace.

And of course, the news of Saruman's bizarre successes in Mordor was enough to get Gandalf to join the party, and, finally, the only leader elected by any kind of vote, Bilbo Baggins would return to Bag End, to be appointed Thain of the Shire.

All of these persons are either deathless, or at least close to it, after having lived in Valinor, so, at least we now have stable government.

At least.

The first year of the new governments was almost more violent than the war years.

According to The Great Edict, issued jointly by the co-kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor, and ratified by all of the other governments of men, elves, & Dwarves, the penalty for War Crimes was death.

War Crimes were, as follows.

Rape, human sacrifice, intentional genocide, murder of POW's, ritual murder, rape or cannibalism, mass murder, usury, mass pillaging, looting, arson or rape, warlordism, intentional premediated murder, killing for personal gain, and violent theft, or burglary.

As you may well imagine, tens of thousands of miscreants had to be rounded up, usually by the still-standing armies.

Mass trials were held in every major city in Middle Earth, resulting in acquittal, conviction on lesser offences, and condemnation.

The execution of Dwarven offenders was carried out by the Balrog of Morgoth, unless they were of noble blood.

In which case, execution was carried out by Thorin Oakenshield.

Queen Galadriel ordered the condemned Elves to commit mass suicide.

Which they, unbelievably, did, all joining hands and walking into the Anduin.

Even though they started the war, it was really a heartbreaker to watch.

I mean the elves had principles, that was why they started the war, and they had a point, too.

Three hundred years of dead dinosaur smoke did fuck up the air and the water a treat.

But when we Steamers invented ways to carry on without making so much pollution about a hundred and fifty years ago, they really ought to've made their peace.

Still, it was terrible, the way they all joined hands and walked into the rivee, no matter what kind of war criminals they were.

None of them even screamed.

So fucking noble, I mean, you wouldn't catch the good ones among Men or Dwarves being so fucking noble, let alone our evil bastards.

No Hobbits or Dwobbits were found guilty of War Crimes.

All of the condemned from the race of men were executed, by beheading, on the same day, on the Pellinor Fields, by the King of Gondor, himself.

None of them went quitetly, and the spectators were loud too.

It was like a fucking holiday, and there was free food and beer for everybody.

That was much less unsettling.

I got very drunk, as I recall, and my brother and I tried to come out of the stands with our axes and help.

The King was good-natured about it, he let us both behead a baddie, and then Da came and knocked our heads together, explained as how the dark Gondorian ale was stronger than what we were used to, and how I was the keeper of the Dwarven executioner.

Then he dragged us back to our seats and made us drink ginger beer and lemonade the rest of the day.

Anyway, that was when the real work began.

Over the next five years, demobbed soldiers, children and old people, nobles, and deathless kings and queens alike, every able bodied soul in Middle Earth, got to work, rebuilding.

It has been another 15 years, since, 20 since the Restoration, 21 since the end of the Great World War.

The post-war world is organised, thus.

All of the Dwarf kingdoms are steam tech, those who are nonindys (non-industrials), can live somewhere else. They are also homeland kingdoms, any steamer who has two Dwarf grandparents, or is a Dwobbit with two Dwobbit parents or one Dwarf parent, is welcome to repatriate.

The Kingdom of Gondor is steam tech, but the kingdom of Arnor, with the exception of the Blue Mountains, is a Free Tech Zone.

All the Elvin realms and dominions are nonindy, as is the Kingdom of Rohan, with the exception of the Wood Elves of Mirkwood.

Well, the Rohrrim do have a great love of firearms, especially rifles, and they are on the railroad, and they did fight on the steamer side, but otherwise, they remain happily mediaval.

Mirkwood and Dale are steam tech, but the surrounding areas are all Free Tech Zones.

Mordor where the shadows lie, is now one huge, garish, leviathan of an industrial city, a dazzling wasteland of tacky, shiny, chintzy glory, where anything goes, and life is cheap.

Those who move to Mordor, seeking fame and fortune, however are forbidden to leave, but for a racial homeland exception.

In order to return to an Elven homeland, you must have two Elven grandparents, or a parent who is a full or half blood Elf.

And accept their tech status.

I told you about the Dwarf standards.

To return to the Shire, you must have a Hobbit surname, be under five feet tall, and have hairy feet.

Any Dwobbit is allowed to repatriate to Khazadshire provided that the Chieftain and his or her council agree to it.

Got it?

Good.

Now, please allow me to introduce myself, further.

My name is Hela Took, and I am a Dwobbit of the Hills of Evendim, and I used to be a good girl.

You know.

Brushed my teeth and minded my parents and kept to my studies, and sure I was a bit of a dreamer, and something of an eccentric, but I was a good girl, a smart girl, destined for great things

I mean, let me tell you something about my generation, those of us who went to war at 12 or 13 at the tail end of a war that had been raging for a couple of fucking centuries, give or take ten years.

By that time, whatever a war meant when it was originally fought doesn't mean a fucking thing, anymore.

Because all the noble bastards who stated it up for all the right reasons are all dead, either of old age or violence.

And the enemy isn't anybody, really, not a race or a thing or a group; the enemy are those fuckers who are trying to murder you and yours for what little you have left because it's more than what they have.

Maybe in the beginning, our fore-fathers and berks like that, they had some noble bloody reason for the whole bit, but even if it started with fight like a lion for the honor of whatever the fuck, by the time I was 12 years old in the belly of a gyro-gear engine steam tank, targeting the fucking enemy with their medieval catapults and cave trolls in bondage gear with fucking artillery shells the size of an elephant's cock, the rules had changed.

You learned to fight as soon as you learned to walk, and if you couldn't make do with blood and shit and fire and metal and mud then you could hurry up and die so that someone worth their arse could get your bowl of soup.

And it was fight like a jackal or a warg , otherwise bleed like a pig and die like a dog and you'll be buried alright, buried in the mud after the tanks roll over you when the battle starts again, tomorrow.

I was 27 when the war ended, not so old for a Dwobbit, as we go to about 400, with modern technology and medical care, but I'd had 15 years of almost constant battle, with hard times, in between, whether with guns and bombs and tanks, or up close and hand to hand with the Enemy, with axe and sword and hammer, and when there was peace, my family were metalworkers.

So it was all fire and metal and the sound of your hammer crashing down in the forge.

Another thing is as to how Middle Earth was so completely fucked up after the Great Steam War that no one bothered to ask how it was that the returned kings, who had been in Valinor for an age, and had pretty much left one medieval world to go and live in another adjusted so well, and so quickly to modern Middle Earth.

If you want to know what I mean when I say modern Middle Earth, think of something like a cross of World War I era and Victorian Europe, in your neck of the universe.

Excepting that parts were still utterly medieval.

Big cities weren't all castles and towers anymore, they were modern cities with modern buildings, gaslight, and cobblestone streets

Even little towns had wooden sidewalks and the dustiest dumps you could think of that were steam tech still had a railroad station.

There were railroads connecting all the Dwarven kingdoms, and railroads connecting the cities of men, like Dale, Minas Tirith and Bree.

There was a local line even, going from Bree to Dwobbiton, Buckland, Michael Delving, and Hobbiton, and big cities all had local trains.

In the Dwarven kingdoms, the local trains ran underground, like your subways, but where you might find horse-drawn buses in Dale or Bree, Dwarven cities had buses powered by the same kinds of engines we used in our tanks.

So did Minas Tirith, though, to be fair.

Our engines are powered by gears and gyros, with cylinders of compressed steam as a power source.

Go ahead and laugh, but at least we get our power from hot water instead of dead dinosaurs.

But, my point is, I always thought the transition of powers went a little too smoothly.

Imagine yourself being one of these medieval types, and here you are, getting off a boat and IMMEDIATELY you get shoved onto this humongous gleaming metal steam train that takes you to a big city, all brick and glass and gaslight and cobblestone, with great big buses full of cogs and wheels and tubes and gears going up and down the streets, honking their horns and belching hot steam into the air.

You would completely shit yourself, no matter how royal and so on you were.

But none of these august heroes so much as blinked an eye at it all.

And Kings Boromir and Thorin, they did seem to become very good with firearms, in a remarkably short period of time.

Why?

Well, let me tell you a little secret that everybody knows.

Good old Gandalf knew of some ways to get from Valinor back to Middle Earth by using magic, not boats, and he often used them.

Especially after the Industrial Revolution began.

And nobody was deeper into the fostering of that revolution than Thorin Oakenshield, himself.

He was already a master metalsmith, and he took to Steam Teach the way a fish takes to water.

And when Gandalf wasn't sending him Over the Hills and far Away by Magic, well, Thorin had his ways.

Small motorboats, moonless nights, and a network of Dwarven conspirators.

I suppose he got bored with the Elves' idea of paradise, and so did the Kings of Men who eventually started coming over with him.

Not only did Gandalf turn a blind eye to it, he covered for our heroes with the powers that be, and a little help from Queen Galadriel, too.

Thorin and Boromir went a step further than their fellow Strangers in a Strange land after the war began to drag on to an horrific extent, and they started taking charge of armies and battles and leading troops into war.

People pretended not to know who these generals in helmets that obscured their faces were, but they had a bit more than suspicion.

Meanwhile, it was Gandalf who led the Dwarves of Moria to where the Balrog's remains were frozen in ice.

Gandalf took our side because the plain fact is that no Dwarf ever tried to force steam on the Elves and in the cities and kingdoms of men where steam took hold, it wasn't as if they were arresting people or burning them at the stake for not wanting any part of it.

Their attitude always was, if you don't like technology, leave, there are plenty of places in Middle Earth that don't like it, either, go live there.

Honestly, the Elves started the war, trying to stamp out something that had been going on for 200 years, and then they got all the Men who were nonindys riled up, and you would think that a war fought on one side by modern methods and on the other by medieval methods wouldn't have taken 200 years, but it wasn't as if the Steamers just wanted to murder all their enemies, which is what we would have had to do to end it.

And the Elves, and so on, they used the fact that no one was planning genocide against us, and what happened was you had this endless state of war where you would have a few years of battle and then a few years of what you lot call cold war, and then attempts at peace that never worked out, and then more years of battle and so on and so on.

Nothing was ever resolved, and the only thing that happened was that things kept getting worse and more people kept dying and I imagine Gandalf was on our side because he thought the Elves and their allies were really being a bunch of dicks about the whole thing.

But, then again, there he was in Valinor, living with a whole pile of them.

None of whom seemed to really know or care how things were back in Middle Earth.

Until somebody tried to take sides against their Elvish brethren.

It was a tricky situation, but the landing of Kili Took was Gandalf's idea and it ended up working perfectly.

Which brings you pretty much up to date on what you might call the inside scoop.

And this is where I come in.

One of the biggest parts of these building of Middle Earth was a Transcontinental Railroad that would start in Bree and go all the way to Dale, and stop at every major steamer and free tech city and kingdom, among Men and Dwarves, along the way.

The old railroads were going to be re-routed and re-paired, and all the trains converted to run on the gyro-gear steam engine rather than the old, slower, coal driven, smoke-belching, lung-choking engines.

This was a massive project and it gave a lot of people who were out of work and had been for years, or demobbed soldiers a steady job, from manufacturing and building the railroads right on up to metalsmiths and engineers.

And the secret weapon for getting in all done in the five years that the Kings of Gondor and Arnor and Thorin promised was the Balrog of Morgoth.

He got a new, state-of the art-engine as a power source, which was supposed to end the difficulty of getting him to do things, since all of his brain was now functioning and he could communicate with anybody who spoke Sindarin.

Or so the smart geezers with the long grey beards thought.

But they didn't know the Balrog like I did.

He was very smart, very old, and very stubborn.

And he refused to do a goddamn thing for anybody without Hela Took.

Because after the war, I had gone home, to the Hills of Evendim, and the little Dwobbit hole and smithy that my father had on the outskirts of Dwobbiton.

There are those that say that a marriage between a Hobbit and Dwarf is always a mistake.

Like my mother and father.

And there are those that say that Fenrir the Berserk never should have married, especially after he became a bit demented following the Battle of Azanulbizar.

The most recent one, that is, which was, if anything, more bloody and tragic than the one in the Third Age, but still took place before I was born.

The idea that they shouldn't have got bloody married at all is also something my mother and father also agree upon.

But, one of the only other things that Oleander Took and her husband, Fenrir the Berserk, do agree upon is that there are only two good things to come from their marriage.

My brother, Fennrir the Younger, and me.

My father was about a hundred and forty when I was born, and my mother was sixty, which, even for a dwarf and a Hobbit, is middle-aged and beyond childbearing years.

They already had a son, my brother, but they wanted a little girl, too.

Fenrir looks just like our Da, except he has dark red hair, and a heart-shaped face, like Mum.

So I was their little miracle.

My mother, Oleander Took, is rather a witch, and teaches school in the Shire.

Da taught us all about metal and fire, and Mum taught us a love of books and learning, and, you know, plants and herbs and potions, 100 uses for athelas, and great-great-great grandmother's all- natural birth control tea, and make your own painkillers and stomach medicine and minor works of magick, andall that.

She has done so for as long as I can remember, but since I was about 20, she has been staying in the Shire, rather than travelling every day for two or three hours to get to our homestead on just beyond the borders of Buckland. She and my father get along a lot better since they only spend the summertime and holidays living together.

And most weekends.

She's a very grand and well–educated lady, even for a Took, so don't ask me why she married a half-mad Dwarf berserker, who was known as a jolly fellow, but one with a horrible temper even before the event that we do not even mention in his presence only had to learn all our maths and sciences and literature and history, when we weren't at war, but we had to learn to read and write the whole works not jut in Westron, but in Sindarin and Khuzdul, too.

Moon runes and all.

Da?

Well, he's a Dwarf.

He's about five foot two or three, tall for a dwarf, and his body, particularly his shoulders and his chest, look as if they were cut from a slab of granite.

He has a very bushy brown beard that likes to stick out of the three braids he keeps it in, and thick, bushy, curly brown hair that stands out all around his head like a lion's mane no matter what he tries to do with it.

And in the middle of all this hair are his very keen and very wolfish blue eyes.

Neither of them actually are as awful as they sound when I describe them; they are both just a little eccentric, but then again, so am I.

I am somewhere in the area of five feet tall, give or take an inch, and I have blue eyes like my father.

But I also have hair the color of fire.

It is not just red, but many hues of red, orange and gold, like a leaping flame.

Like Loki's.

My parents took that as a sign that I was a miracle, a gift of the gods, intended for Great Deeds.

We shall see about that, as I, myself, am not too sure.

Being half a Hobbit, I have very furry feet and very little beard, only a little downy goatee that I make into a tiny little braid that is only the thickness of a pencil and about as long as my longest finger.

Which has only just grown in.

And I have rather small hands.

Which, like my father's and brother's, and all Dwarf berserkers, are heavily tattooed.

I also some Dwarrow knot tattoos on my biceps and my forearms, and calves, and on one side of each eye.

My father sent my brother off to war when he was 13, and ten ten years later when I was 13, off I went, too.

My mother would rather I took up a gentler profession, like magick, finding a husband, having some grandchildren and writing Tookish histories, as she professes that she will once she retires, but she is a Took, after all, and as long as she gets the son in law and the grandchildren, she doesn't mind if they come with a little bit of war, aforethought.

Something Da is an expert in.

He made sure that my brother and I were ready to defend ourselves against attack with sword, axe, hammer, pistol, rifle, or machine gun.

And that we carried on the long tradition as expert craftsmen, going back in our family to the First Age.

Now, my brother was the oldest son, and so on, but Mum and Da put all their eggs in my basket, as they figured on how I was the smart one and the most talented and my brother, he was with them.

I think my brother's every bit as good as I am, but, sing as you go.

In Mum and Da's minds though, my brother and I, we are basically their long-term fucking investment and retirement plan that they expect to pay off, double geschvinn.

So I might be Hela the Horrible, and my brother, Fenrir the Ferocious, or something, but Mum and Da, they both suffer from just the smallest bit of megalomania, and a few minor delusions of grandeur.

Because, in truth, I am only Hela, daughter of Fenrir, blacksmith, although I do , myself have some grandiose dreams.

Fenrir and I, my brother, I mean we'd always talk about what we'd do after the war was over, but it turned out that we just got awfully bored and like a lot of former soldiers we spent a lot of time drinking too much and getting into fights.

Well, actually, we spent our free time doing that, so we didn't get into half as much trouble as most ex-soldiers because Da kept us working, and on a short leash.

My brother and I are both afraid of the same two people, alone, in all of Middle Earth.

Our father and our mother.

Well, my brother put up with it as long as he could, and then he just left one night and took the train to Moria, and found work, there.

He sent me home a little money when he could, and I was saving up to make the journey and get a job, too.

I mean, I do like the old homestead.

It's a peaceful, quiet place, very green and pastoral, all up the hill and down again, and you have to get there by horse and all, and then there's our homestead at the bottom of a hill.

You can see the Blue Mountains, and the River Lune, at the tops of the hills.

We're pretty much right outside Buckland.

There is a small barn, for the ponies and Da's cart horse, and the cow, and the shed where our gyro gear generator is, and the old man's smithy, and our home is cut into the side of the hill, in Hobbit fashion.

The only problem with the place is that Mum and Da live there.

My father, Fenrir the Berserk, son of Tyr the Fearless, had quite a bit of trouble with his nerves.

We lived so far away from town because, after the Battle of Azanulbizar, he found that most things upset him to the point where he went berserk, but as long as we were in the cottage, or at the smithy, or even in Dwobbiton, or parts of the Shire, where people knew him and he knew them, he was alright.

But, as my mother reminded me , daily, you had to keep an eye on him, just to make sure.

Because he'd kill an Elf on sight, and if a man said a word the wrong way to him, he'd make him wish he hadn't.

When Mum was home, she did go on about how she wished she could live in the Shire with the rest of her Took relatives, and how weekends and three months when school was not in session was plenty of time to live with my crazy father in exile like and he ought to try harder and so on and so forth.

Well, I wouldn't mind living in the Shire or in Dwobbiton, either and I think Da would like to, but he just isn't very good with people.

Mind you, like most Dwarves, he has a love of gold; money makes him and my mother feel ever so much better and nicer, and Mum and I both think that if Da had just a little treasure of his own, one chest, even, he would settled down enough that he could live with people again.

Which would be good for Da, because he gets lonely.

And he'll go to the Shire, to visit with Mum, and go to the Green Dragon, which is still there, and make trips to Dwobitton, but everyone knows its only a matter of time before he goes berserk.

It doesn't bother most Hobbits or Dwarves of Dwobbits, anymore, crazy old Fenrir has been around longer lot of them had been alive, and he destroys only things, not Hobbits, but he gets embarrassed and upset, and then they have to send him home, again.

I mean, they are me parents and I love them desperately, and anyone who calls my mother a witch to my face, rather than sorceress practitioner, as we prefer to be called , or says me Da is a nutter, I'll clobber the shit out of them.

But their theory was pretty much that they brought Fenrir and I into the world, and so we were in it to serve them, and unless any greatness that they could partake in called us away from home, then home is where we should be.

Well, greatness came to me, in the form of the King's nephew, Fili.

I think Thorin sent Fili because he had come over, permanently, from the Undying lands about 60 or 70 years before, with his brother at Thorin's directions, and Fili and my father, they were good friends, and had fought together.

And I think Fili agreed to come because it wasn't just my father he wanted to see.

What?

So he's a couple of thousand years old, technically?

But if you take away his time in Valinor, which though a thousand years or so in our reckoning was only about twenty years for him, something about the way time passes, and count from when he returned to Middle Earth, he's in his hundred and twenties, which is for a dwarf, a man in his prime.

Besides, he's you know, deathless and ageless or something, and very blue eyed and beardy and blond and, you know, merry and mad and dashing and dead sexy, like a blond, miniature Errol Flynn.

The point is, Fili came to relay the message that I was needed in Moria as the Keeper of the Balrog, and to sweeten the pot, that Thorin Oakenshield was so impressed with my redesign and overhaul of the Good old Balrog's mechanical parts, especially the new engine, that he wanted me to be his Apprentice Metalsmith Engineer.

My parents refused to agree without Fili's promising to marry me in five years once I turned 33, and a real metalsmith's job with a good wage for my brother, who was now working as a welder and sheet-metal cutter on a factory floor.

And there was the small matter of my dowry.

One chest of Smaug's treasure, for the old man.

We had to ride into Buckland, and go to my Mum's cousin Faramir Brandybuck's hobbit hole to use his telephone to call back to Moria, because the phone lines don't go tour house, just the telegraph wires.

No special reason, just Farmir's house was the closest.

Fili talked to this uncle, and then my father got on the blower, and it was Old Home Week for awhile, beteen him and the King, and then all was well and pretty soon I was home and packed and it was goodbye and I'll be home for a visit soon, and my father rode Fili and I to the train station in Hobbiton in his wagon.

The first thing I did when I got to Moria was to get in the elevator and go all the way down to the Balrog's lair, deep beneath the earth, to climb up on his back and scratch that place between his wings he can't reach, and thank him, because if it wasn't for him I would have been my parents slave for the next 360 years or so.

Let me tell you this, sometimes it's the friends in low places that are the best ones, and you can take that to mean what you like.

Wait.

I suppose I'm getting ahead of myself, here.

I have a tendency to tell stories all backwards and inside out; I suppose I think in circles or ellipses or shit like that.

What do you want, I grew up in the belly of a fucking tank murdering things, my father is called the Berserk, and my good old time army buddy is the Balrog of Morgoth?

So this is probably a good place to stop, and tell you how a nice Dwobbit lass like me, from a fine old military family, related, after all, to one of the Aesir, ended up wrecked and ruined and broken down as I am now.

Sold for my seven figure debt and delivered in chains to old Sharkey himself, who holds my promissory notes and my fate in his hands, as I make my payments in blood, as a gladiator in the Cirque du Mourir, that is, the Circus of Death.

In the 100,000 seat Grand Coliseum attached to the the fabulous Barad-Dur Hotel and Casino.

The star attraction, three times a week and twice on Fridays and Saturdays in the prime-time, gore-porn, Greatest Show in Middle Earth.

In Mordor, that blood-soaked, booze-sodden, pleasure-drenched wonderland of sex, sin and degeneracy, where life is cheap and everything else is expensive, and if you can afford it, there's no pleasure or pain, that you can't buy.

Where more than the shadows lie.

Intrigued?

Read on, MacDuff.


End file.
